You can damage your career or impact your earning ability by accepting anything and everything.

This week I had an example of how this can happen.

A client who did a car commercial two years ago for $500 via a casting site, wasn’t eligible to audition for a car commercial this week. The fee, if he could have auditioned and got it, was $12,000.

Why couldn’t he audition?

Because these days the industry has a conflict rule. Almost every commercial brief, in every country, has a conflict list on it and it invariably says “no competing products in the past 3 years”.

So he couldn’t audition. In fact it gets worse for this guy because the original job he did for $500 didn’t have a contract so, in essence, by not signing a contract stating otherwise, he has given away the right to that company to air their commercial anywhere in the world, in perpetuity, thereby potentially stopping him from doing car commercials forever.

So get some advice before agreeing to anything – even an email can be taken as your consent and never go on set – any set; film, TV or commercial without a solid signed contract.